Standard Chartered Online Trading Sets Minimum Brokerage Amount: How this may affect you

Readers who on occasion came across my portfolio would have notice that my brokerage commission sometimes can be rather low. It is certainly lower than the minimum SG$29 brokerage for Singapore’s brokerages. This is because I use Standard Chartered Online Trading (SCB), which is a nominee account where they do not charge you a minimum commission. What this means is that for example if I buy 1000 shares of Transit Mixed, an illiquid Singapore stock traded at $0.60, my commission is roughly $0.60 x 1000 x 0.00256 = $1.536. It looks like tremendous advantage for investors who are starting out with less capital and folks who have less conviction in certain stocks and would like to take “recce” positions (Kyith loves to do that a lot of times as well) The bad news for many customers who made use of SCB’s Online Trading comes this week in a mailer that states that there will be ...